Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-m9kch Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-07T12:55:40.711Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Long Run of Victorian Theater

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2020

Lauren Eriks Cline Open the ORCID record for Lauren Eriks Cline [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It's March 2020 as I write this, and the theaters are closed. Broadway is dark, and the Globe is once again shut due to a plague. Perhaps “self-isolation” is a strange condition under which to be thinking about crowded Victorian playhouses. As I make dates to watch movies with friends hundreds of miles away on the Netflix Party app, the media environment in which I pursue entertainment has perhaps never felt more dissimilar to that of nineteenth-century theatergoers. But, then again, maybe the photos of empty auditoria and deserted streets are the best demonstration of the space that public culture has taken up in our lives. The vacuum shows us that what's missing mattered. And if scholars of Victorian theater have shared a primary goal, it's to insist on how deeply the collective experience of playgoing influenced the everyday practices and beliefs of the period—even when theater and drama may not always appear on Victorian syllabi or conference programs. This essay considers three recent studies in Victorian theater—The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama (2018), edited by Carolyn Williams; The Drama of Celebrity (2019), by Sharon Marcus; and Everyone's Theater: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914 (2019), by Michael Meeuwis—to register the force that theatrical performance exerted on Victorians and to explore how that force could change our sense of the field. By dwelling with archives and objects that might otherwise get classed as cultural “ephemera,” these studies push us to acknowledge that the run of Victorian theater hasn't ended. In the collective pause before a moment of intense feeling, or in a contradictory attachment to a public figure who is both imitable and extraordinary, they find a repertoire of spectator behavior from which many of our own modes of attention derive.

Type
Review
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , Fall 2020 , pp. 623 - 631
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Booth, Michael. English Melodrama. London: Harold Jenkins, 1965.Google Scholar
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Daly, Nicholas. “Melodrama.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46, nos. 3–4 (2018): 766–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eriks Cline, Lauren. “Performance.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46, nos. 3–4 (2018): 795–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffiths, Devin. “Petrodrama: Melodrama and Energetic Modernity.” Victorian Studies 60, no. 4 (2018): 611–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hadley, Elaine. Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Hambridge, Katherine, and Hicks, Jonathan, eds. The Melodramatic Moment, 1780–1820. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
John, Juliet. Dickens's Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Marcus, Sharon. The Drama of Celebrity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
McConachie, Bruce A. Melodramatic Formations: American Theater and Society, 1820–1870. Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meeuwis, Michael. Everyone's Theater: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, Martin. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newey, Katherine. “Victorian Theatre: Research Problems and Progress.” In The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, edited by John, Juliet, 659–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Rayner, Alice. Ghosts: Death's Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 3rd ed.New York: Routledge, 2013.Google Scholar
Williams, Carolyn. “Melodrama.” Victorian Literature and Culture 46, nos. 3–4 (2018): 769–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Carolyn, ed. The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vargo, Gregory. An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.Google Scholar